8 August 2023 | Computers, How Does it Work? |
Software RAID is great, especially for servers. While you can use RAID for increased speed, most people use RAID mirroring so that all data is written to two identical disks.
If one disk fails, your server stays up because the 2nd drive still works. But what happens when a drive fails?
The replacement process obviously requires your hosting company to the replace the drive.
But both before and after the physical drive replacement, you’ve got some work to do!
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22 November 2022 | Uncategorized |
If you’re using Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), you may be wondering how to upgrade your flavor of linux in place.
Whether you’re using WSL or WSL2, you could just go to the Windows Store and download the whole new shebang.
In my case, I was using Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, and it’s gonna die in the near future. So, I wanted to do a double-upgrade from 18.04 to 20.04 to 22.04. I’ve got a ton of stuff installed and configured, shell scripts set up, rsync, git, and so on – and I didn’t want to have to redo all of it.
Due to some strange error messages when you try do-release-upgrade, it doesn’t seem like you can do an in-place upgrade in WSL1/2 – but you can!
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23 June 2020 | Computers, Networking, Programming |
Ubuntu server 18.04 LTS is a rather popular linux OS for servers.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t come without its problems. For example, the current version of stunnel – an SSL tunnel – is woefully outdated.
It seems that although Canonical is aware of the problem, they have no intention of fixing it!
Fortunately, there’s an easy workaround that’s much simpler than you might think…
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16 October 2018 | Computers |
Another Windows 10 upgrade is here: the Windows 10 October 2018 update.
For those of us using WSL, or “Linux on Windows”, that means potential mayhem.
When the last Win 10 upgrade version was released, I installed it. I then discovered that my Ubuntu icon no longer loaded anything – except a Bash window with an error message that Ubuntu on Windows was no longer installed!
Oops.
Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to fix!
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7 August 2018 | Computers |
If you’re running Ubuntu or another linux shell in Windows 10 via WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux), you’ve probably wondered about using cron.
Cron is super-handy for doing things, like, running a backup.
You see, as useful as WSL is, it stores all the linuxy files in a way that is not exactly easily backup-able by File History or anything else… as far as I can tell.
Worse yet, even when you try to set up a cron job to run a backup, it doesn’t work!
What to do, what to do?
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17 April 2018 | Computers, Programming |
In the olden days, there was only “Bash on Ubuntu on Windows 10”. This little gem gave you something like reverse WINE.
You got an Ubuntu linux install that’s running on top of the Windows kernel – with full file system access, the ability to install and run all kinds of linux command-prompty stuff like git, and even graphical linux apps like gitk.
Fast forward a few years, and things have changed…
What if you’re still running Bash on Ubuntu on Windows (Ubuntu 14.04) and you want to upgrade to the latest Ubuntu 16.04 without reinstalling everything?
Or, what if you want a different flavor of linux?
14 August 2016 | Computers, Programming |
You may have heard about “Bash on Ubuntu on Windows”. If not, you can check out my post on Bash for Windows 10.
First, you’ll need to make sure you have the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, which you’ve probably received automagically by now.
Then, you’ll need to manually install Bash on Ubuntu on Windows to get your bash prompt.
When you’re done, you’ll probably listen to Microsoft when they say “no GUI stuff!” on bash… But actually, you can set yourself up with a lovely development environment including git – and even gitk – right in Windows.
And it’s much easier than you might think…
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3 April 2016 | Computers, Programming |
This summer, Windows 10 will be 1 year old. Microsoft recently announced that they’ll be releasing another “major” update for their latest OS around this time.
Most of the new features are nothing terribly earth-shattering. Probably the most impactful change to most users will be a slight modification to the Start Menu.
For power users, however, they’ve got something rather big planned: Windows 10 will soon include the Ubuntu Linux Bash shell (probably as an optional app/download).
What in tarnation is going on here?!
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6 March 2016 | Computers |
Let’s say you want to dual-boot between Windows and some flavor of linux.
You might think that you need some kind of fancy partitioning software like Paragon Hard Disk Manager 15 Suite
to free up disk space for the linux partitions.
You might also think that your linux installer will do everything for you automatically.
As it turns out, neither of the above are always true!
Sometimes, you need free space on your drive in order for the linux install (even Ubuntu) to be happy.
Fortunately, there is a very easy and built-in way to shrink a partition in all modern versions of Windows without any fancy software!
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23 April 2012 | Computers |
If you have a dual-boot setup on your computer involving some flavor of linux, at some point you will most likely encounter a problem with GRUB, the linux bootloader.
For example, maybe you used a tool like Paragon Hard Disk Manager Suite to resize your OS partitions. Then you tried to reboot, and you got a GRUB error message followed by the GRUB rescue prompt.
There are several ways to reinitialize GRUB, and most of them involve live CDs and mounting partitions and all kinds of other tricks that will probably make you crazy unless you’re a command-line commando in linux.
Well, I don’t mind the command line, but I also have better things to do.
Fortunately, there is a MUCH easier way to save the day: Boot-Repair!
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Software RAID is great, especially for servers. While you can use RAID for increased speed, most people use RAID mirroring so that all data is written to two identical disks.
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